Buy the Vinyl on Juno or buy the Mp3 at Beatport or on itunes

The song is out on Exploited, my old buddy Shir Khan’s label. And here you can listen to what it would be like when the party goes on:
SHIR KHAN presents BLACK JUKEBOX 01 (trax by Homework, Doctor Dru&Adana Twins) by Exploited

On Monday 6/20 “Dirty Old Town” will premiere at the legendary Kino Babylon in Berlin with other engagements to follow. In addition my first film “Captured” will also be released theatrically at Kino Babylon in Berlin. Starts at 20:30!

DIRTY OLD TOWN: OFFICIAL PROMO – SPRING 2011 from Dirty Old Town on Vimeo.

I like the trailer because it looks like a very strange movie with lots of interesting characters. Don’t miss the chance to see it!

To The Beat from Desolat MG on Vimeo.

Klar, dass mir auch die Folgen aus Barcelona, z.B. mit dem Designer Borja Martinez gut gefallen. Sein Grafikstudio heißt übrigens “Lo siento”, was ein nettes Wortspiel ist. Es bedeutet sowohl “ich fühle es” als auch “es tut mir leid”. Kein schlechter Name für eine Agentur.

Konbini ist ein Onlinesender mit viel witzigem und popkulturell interessanten Videos. Taugt nicht nur für einen Abend TV Ersatz!

Besonders der Vortrag von Thomas Zauner, von ScanlineVFX, eine der bekanntesten FX Firmen der Welt, die sich besonders auf die visuelle Simulation von Flüssigkeiten, Feuer und Rauch spezialisiert haben, war fantastisch. Tatsächlich ist es für den Zuschauer inzwischen überhaupt nicht mehr zu erkennen, was realer Film und was nachträgliche eingebaute Effekte sind.

Abends wurden die Animago Awards verliehen und auch hier gab es einige herausragende Arbeiten zu sehen. Wenn möglich, habe ich hier die Filme eingebaut, leider sind nicht alle online zu sehen oder haben nur Trailer.

Hier ist der offizielle Award-Trailer, toll geschnitten, der einen Überblick über die Einreichungen vermittelt, nach dem Klick dann alle Gewinner-Filme.

Beste technische Realisierung: Pixels von Patrick Jean, Autour de Minuit, Frankreich

Visualisierung: History of Poland, Platige Image, Polen

Werbefilm: Mercedes G Class Fireworks, INFECTED Postproduction, Deutschland

Bester Kurzfilm: Babioles, Matray, Autour de Minuit, Frankreich
– hier ist noch ein Trailer mit dem kleinen Kerl und außerdem das Extra-Dankeschön für den animago Award.
und
Logorama, H5, Autour de Minuit, Frankreich

Bestes Game Design: Red Dead Redemption

Bestes Mobile Feature: iDough iPad App

Beste interaktive Produktion: aLife 1.0, q-bus Mediatektur, Deutschland
Website

Nachwuchspreis: Mobile, Verena Fels
Leider gibt es dazu nichts online, aus mir nicht verständlichen Gründen.

Sonderpreis der Jury: Loom, Polynoid, Deutschland

Wieder einmal ist den Machern der Palladium Explorations Serie eine klasse Video-Doku gelungen, die uns an interessante Orte führt und uns interessanten Menschen vorstellt. Gastgeber ist dieses Mal kein Geringerer als Jonny Knoxville of Jackass Fame. In drei Teilen fährt er durch Detroit, erforscht ehemalige Karosserie-Fabriken, trifft alte Bluesbar-Besitzer, die ihren Laden wieder aufgemacht haben, sieht urbane Gärten auf verlassenen Grundstücken und lässt sich von vielen begeisterten Detroitern, u.a. Carl Craig oder Black Milk die Faszination dieser wieder erwachenden Stadt und der immensen Möglichkeiten erklären “Ich bin 24 und habe ein neunstöckiges Gebäude zur Verfügung!” (Jeff, Event-Coordinator der Nothend Studios)

Hier Film 1 von 3, alle anderen gibt es auf palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit

All condensed in some very intense 15 minutes, filmed with a flip camera.

If you are looking for the official all concerts of Melt professional high quality documentations, you can find it at 3min.de

Exemplarisch dazu eine Reportage zu Straßengewalt in Philadelphia, die u.a. Polizisten, Straßendealer und Heroin-Abhängige zu Wort kommen lässt. Für einen Krimi-Serien-Fan wie mich (The Shield, The Wire, Sopranos) sind die allzu bekannten Bilder beklemmend, weiß man doch dass es sich dabei nicht um Fiktion handelt sondern um die Realität.

Try it out at http://www1.lost-in-val-sinestra.com/

Update: Obviously, this is not a movie Trailer but a campaign for Swisscom, as Techcrunch reports.

Thank you third world!

Filmed by Ben Dowden, I found it via Echolot, Stylespion has more videos.

“Captured” is a film about the New York artist Clayton Patterson and a film about the change in the Lower East side, Manhattan, during the last 20 years. Patterson has tons of foto and video material from the time when the Lower East side was a dirty, cheap, chaotic, independent, arty, druggy, anarchic area. Not only with Giuliani this changed into yet another hip and expensive place to live in New York nowadays. “Captured” shows this change and the protagonists around Patterson, e.g. the art scene, the hardcore scene (with Bad Brains e.g.), the queer scene, the squatters.

Filmmakers Den Levin, Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst managed to boil down Pattersons’ hours of film into a consistent, exciting and interesting 90min movie, which literally makes you feel sad you hadn’t been there when it was still rough.

Captured Homepage
Captured MySpace

While the Evo2 is running hot right now, the winners of the first contest are presenting the results of their work since winning the contest at the big Hobnox launch party and evolution festival in february 08. Missy Magazine, a mag about pop, politics and style from a feministic viewpoint is now available as a good old glossy print mag, while Boombaker, a very energetic live drum’n'bass/breakbeat band are on tour right now.

Here, I’d like to present some of the most interesting pieces and explain the rules in a nutshell.

Evolution2 features a different kind of contest setup. For 10 weeks now and for two more following weeks, in the categories music, film and culture a weekly winner is being voted by the Hobnox users and get prizes like recording material or professional software. Together with 12 other projects in each category who are going to be selected by a jury they enter the final round. Between 01.12.08 and 14.12.08 users can then vote one project in each category who will receive 30000$ to support future projects.

So, who’s hot this time? One of my favourites is Suchtmaschine, noisy and emotional instrumental post rock, reminding of Mogwai and the like. Here is their song “Kumasi“:

I also very much liked the electronic soundscapes of Fecr-I Ati, winner of the 7th week.

And of course I like a project submitted in the culture category: Guerilla projections, who do exactly what you expect from the name.

So, Evolution2 in my opinion has even more quality then the first Evolution. Go there, vote for the stuff you like, the people behind the projects will be very thankful.

und hier ein echter Loriot Klassiker. Der Politiker Karlheinz Stiegler hält eine Grundsatzrede im Bundestag.
Lustige Videos – Gratis Fun Video – Deine funny Videos bei Clipfish

Sunday (yesterday), the trailer celebrated its world premiere on Myspace -already, almost 10 000 watched the very emotional ride between party, excess, despair and paranoia. In the movie, Kalkbrenner stars DJ Ickarus who travels the world djing and is about to release his second album – like the Ikarus from Greek mythology he raises a little to high.. The movie comes to the theatres on october 2nd.

Berlin Calling – Offizieller Trailer zum Film

Like today: Meet at 21:00h at Hauptbahnhof – Hauptausgang Europaplatz and walk to a abandoned hospital. In the operating room you will watch “Komm Süßer Tod”.

If you are lucky, you can get on this list and be informed next time.

“The only jews who crossed the tracks in the neighborhood were students making documentaries and drug addicts”

Sehsüchte, Europe’s Biggest International Student Film Festival takes place again at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen „Konrad Wolf“ in Marlene-Dietrich-Allee 11 in Potsdam. The quote from below stems from the Israelian movie “Roads” about kids in Lod, drugs and hip hop and perspectives for young people.

The rest of the program is highly interesting as well and Hobnox presents some selected movies from the Sehsüchte 08 program.
In general, this is a good time for film festivals in Berlin, Britspotting, the British independent film festival took place from 10th to 16th of april and now moves to Cologne. achtung Berlin, the new Berlin film award which focuses on young Berlin filmmakers has just finished as well (16th to 22nd of april).

Welcome to the movie city Berlin!

Via Debug and Netzpolitik’s Twitter.

Check out my articles about multitouch displays and the Monome Midi Controller.

It’s fascinating, once I dive into this universe of shows I at least spend half an hour watching “11 Freunde magazine” or the very classy movie mag “Oh Gosh“. To kick off their efforts Hobnox organizes a contest called “Evolution” – until the end of January people can upload their creative projects in the categories music, film and street. So far, cool stuff has been uploaded but there’s still a lot to gain. After a voting a jury (e.g. with Moneybrother or Intro editor Linus Volkmann) will pick a winner in each category who will then get a package worth of 25000€ in project funding (like studio or postproduction costs etc.). Here is a recent video of some ionteresting projetcs so far, actually, I really like Pete Blume, kind of remind of Madsen a little..

And here is a video of a secret Jahcuzi concert at a Boombx event!

So it’s all about concerts and which band is able to really give the people a good time and makes them tell their friends and come back the next time. Music is a service, more than ever.

A band who is able to rock it every time are Mike Skinner aka the Streets and his musicians. Wednesday evening, a sponsored concert brought about 1500 people to an open air venue and after a little chilly start everybody got into a great mood and danced and hugged each other to get a little warmer. Thumbs up for Mike Skinner!

Yesterday, I missed Polarkreis18 AGAIN! Damn, but these boys play and play and actually here is a little concert (again, by Sli-Fi, these people have a LOT of stuff on the net..)

So what’s the program? Tonight: Trentemöller at Maria and Sonar Kollektiv, at Tape and saturday Pokerflat night at Watergate and Sunday, well, if the weather stays as great as it did these days, there will be some open air after hour like the Stadtfest or the Karneval for sure..

Nice footage, nice streaming and a nice player, I must say.

This is the first of a series of three films I shot this weekend while I had my aunt visiting. Nice mix of underground and overground culture.

The festival goes on for a week and there are people who actually spend almost all their time there. But the festival wristbands reveal many festival visitors also in parks, museums or in Budapest’s hot springs. All Budapest seems to be Sziget festival during these days, providing an impressive backdrop of art-nouveau, socialist and post-socialist architecture.

There is a nice blog, updated daily by Zeit magazine (in German) about Sziget, which I recommend, so I won’t be writing much here (to sum it up: We had good weather and bad, healthy food and greasy, good music and not so good.. ), just provide you with a short movie I cut together and some foto impressions.

Rain couldn’t stop us

Neither these girls

Get clean in the bodywash

A little classier in the famous Gellert spa

Situated in a hotel

even classier: the old (hundreds of years) Turkish bath

You need like three Palinkas after this

Drum’n'Bass in the afternoon

These “funny hats” never get out of style on festivals..

Make yourself a home at Sziget..

Picture by LotteLenya

It’s interesting: Two years ago, I was one of a few people who wrote about the Melt! festival and one a few people who posted their festival pictures on Flickr. YouTube didn’t exist back then. Last year, there were tons of pictures and videos. And this year, there are even many, many blog posts about this amazing festival on an extraordinary site, not to forget the Melt-forum which has an impressive way of self organization – one half of the people bitches about prices, the growing size, quality of the music and the other half defends their favorite festival with enthusiasm. So I watched many many videos on YouTube, scanned Flickr and the blogosphere just to get you the best and most relevant material on this year’s issue of one of the greatest festivals on the planet.

“…ein unerwarteter Schub von rechts und schon liege ich. Alle großen Momente meines Lebens (Fummeln bevor Anatomie in Bio drankam, der erste Jägermeister, Pilzragout auf’m Dorffest) ziehen nochmal vor meinem Auge entlang. Doch dann zieht mich die Hand, deren Anhängsel gerade für mein Fallen verantwortlich war, mit einem Lächeln wieder hoch. I can feel the community!”
Read the whole hilarious review at Wertaufholer [via Andreas]

So how was Melt X, the 10th issue of this tasty in-between indie and electronic music festival on a peninsula surrounded by gigantic machines? Overwhelming and amazing again I must say. I worked most of the time but it would be a lie to say that my job is not a great one. Taking care of the musicians as they come and wander around with their mouths open to see the venue and then get blown away by the audience. Few don’t get excited by that. Unfortunately Kelis was one of them. Let herself drive to the stage (20 meters..) and then sing like a man and move like a crash test dummy. Biggest disappointment.

And I felt a little bad for Snap! who had to play six o’clock in the morning after Deichkind had totally rocked out the energy of the crowd. So when “Rhythm is a dancer” set in, everybody just had to leave. Too bad, really. Opinions to Deichkind differ – some thought it was a little boring, the same show in the third year but thousands of enthusiastic people can’t lie and actually the band put more effort in the costumes and the show than ever. They always start many hours before stagetime and handicraft themselves into madness. I very much enjoyed the show this year again (which might also be connected to the many vodkas I had to drink in a very short time – boss’ order, what can you say).

Deichkind – Bon voyage:

“Melt Festival… OMG! What an amazing location for a rave/dance party, out in the middle of nowhere, amongst a heap of gigantic, massive, old, rusting, industrial, mining, digging, steal processing machines, all lit up with fantastic lighting, excellent sound and lighting everywhere, market stalls, diverse music line-up, lots of food and snacks, and cheap drinks.”
Read about a whole tour involving Melt, Tresor, Maria am Ufer, Berghain/Panorama Bar AND Knut in only three days at decoded_

Ok, but who was the best on the festival? Goose definitely rocked so unbelievably hard that I thought the roof was coming of. Such a perfect mix of rock and electro that blew everybody away. Best sound award goes to Trentemöller. He just put out a gigantic blanket of bass and melody over the crowd and everybody who expected club madness was surprised and delighted to be carried away by such a dubby experience. Polarkreis18 surely lived up to the expectations being one of the most interesting young German bands. I just hope they don’t get tired of all the playing and always delivering such an emotional performance.
Best entertainer: Dendemann. Even for those who don’t like Hiphop he did a good show with lots of head nodding and booty shaking.

Polarkreis18:

Goose – Ultimate Heavy Electro-Rock Alarm:

Trentemöller Dubby Drum club experience:

Two bands I did not see but listened to because I had to work, were Black Rebel Motorcycle Club who had a bright and fat sound but somewhat seemed to be a little fed up and overplayed. And then there were the Shout Out Louds who sounded like The Cure – great! Hot Chip surprised not only me but a lot of people. Disco-popping into the sunset. I personally very much liked Werle & Stankowski with their very unique mix of singer-songrwriter tunes, electro background and bluesy attitude. But there were so many great bands, impossible to mention them all. I subscribe to Tonspion’s view when they say:

“Wenn ihr wissen wollt wie der Jan Delay, der Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Shitdisco und Tocotronic waren, müsst ihr eure Freunde fragen. Sorry. Man kann nicht alles sehen, denn das Melt hat ein Luxusproblem: zuviel des Guten.”

But the unofficial, secret star of this festival certainly was Jake the Rapper. He played a live set and a DJ set one day later, he was always around, connecting and small talking and without him, I guess I had become target of a severe thunderstorm: Goldie in a bad mood.

The records and CDs of the charismatic entertainer, DJ, manager, writer and most of all godfather of Drum’n'Bass had been accidently transferred to London instead of Berlin (actually that happens quite often I must say). A DJ without music is a sad figure – what were we supposed to do? Thanks to Senuti and Jake’s Mac, Goldie could transfer many files from his iPod to Jake’s computer and burn seven cds. These he used for his three hour set and definitely made the people very, very happy. He was very happy himself, not to say enthusiastic: “You know when things go wrong like this and you have to improvise, that’s the best. Nothing new ever happens if you never have to improvise!” Said it, hugged me so hard I hardly could breathe and then ran off to meet Richie Hawtin (who he hadn’t met before). Climbed right on stage and hugged him as well. Very intense person, very charming and interesting. It was a pleasure to meet him, really.

Goldie and MC Lowqui begin:

and deliver:

Coming slowly to an end, I just want to pay credit to all the people who share their memory on the web, especially those who really made the effort to edit little movies about their Melt experience. There are many many interesting and cute documentaries out there.

While Justice/Simian Mobile Disco’s song “We are your friends” was the unofficial hit of the festival last year, this time it was Soulwax’s edit of the Klaxon’s song “Gravity’s rainbow“. I heard it over ten times in different locations, here, some people are dancing to it on the camping site:

Not everybody was so lucky:

“es kam was kommen mußte: Ich rutsche auf dem Arsch die Böschung hinunter bis ich im Schilf des Sees zum Stehen kam. Was für eine groteske Situation: 500 Meter hinter mir spielte gerade unüberhörbar Dizzie Rascal sein Set auf der Mainstage, während ich auf einmal in der Uferzone des Gremminer Sees eine Fangopackung genoß.” from Reality on the rocks

Here’s a short video about Red Bull’s music academy activities, very interesting and ambitious approach, still:

And I would like to finish the longest blog entry I have ever written with this video that shows Magda on the Big Wheel floor which was pure electro all the time. Out of the Minus crew, I like her best:

Here are some more links: Really good pictures have Tranzland and Sint@Flickr but you’ll find great pictures by other photographers all over. And here’s a list of not to be missed blog entries about Melt 07 aka Melt X.

Update: There’s a special midsommer celebration open air party going on for three days in a formy red army military base in Bernau, close to Berlin with many, many great electronic music acts organized by such infamous party crews like Pentagonik, Wir sind Park or Patentblau.: Check out the lineup, pictures and how to get there!

And here is a little impression of how it looks now: Michael Mayer on the beach for Sónar 2006

So they features documentaries like the BBC’s “Parallel Universe” or the History’s channel “Secret Societies” (like Skull and Bones which George Bush claims to be a member of and which also played an important role for the emergence of the CIA, as explained in the movie “The Good Sheperd“)

This session is part of the Take Away Shows by La Blogohèque and was taken in Paris before their show at the Olympia. First we see everybody quite concentrated in the warddrobe, then they play “Neon Bible” in the old freight elevator and then “Wake Up” in the middle of the audience before starting their show.

Read more about the background of this session.

Nun gibt es ein sehr gut gemachtes Videoportrait über sein bisheriges Werk, gedreht von WILL KILL, (seinem “rabenfitten” Keyboarder – das sorgt zwar nicht für dokumentarische Unabhängigkeit, dafür aber umso mehr für aufschlussreiche Nähe). Und hier sind alle vier, so unterhaltsamen wie interessanten Teile.
Und: FlowinIMMO spielt am 16.05. im Lovelite, Berlin.

Flowin Immo // Grenzenloser Hip Hop from William Veder on Vimeo.

“To make this, I used PDFs from our architects as a base to trace all the walls on 11 layers in an Adobe Illustrator file, then exported each floor as an XML-based Scalable Vector Graphics file, each of which I ran through a PHP script to extract the object info and convert it to something I could paste in a notecard. Then I made 11 objects (the little cubes in front of me in the video) that scoot themselves off to a predetermined location, spew out prims based on the notecards, and send them to their appropriate positions. The next step, is to rez this on the ground, terraform, and then texture-bake every single prim…”
Watch Kisa Naumova model her working place in Second Life with a perfect fitting Daft Punk soundtrack.